“Most rivers are confined to the needs and histories of men. Like roads, they seem inconsequential without their travelers. The Colorado is an outlaw.”
— Frank Waters.
The sack of money floated down the river and the bankers who had managed to untie themselves — some still clutching the fraying rope in their clenched, white hands — gave chase after it.
The river’s biggest claim to current fame came from throwing a tributary underneath an entire train transporting cattle, cargo, and gold, hiding it like a crow’s trap until the moment came and the train — as a diplomat might say — left. Jesse James wished he was good enough to pull that kind of cloth from underneath the kitchen table.
The river is responsible for that. The river is responsible for young women crafting well-honed non-sequitors and running through legions of sun-flared wheat field and cat tail photographs —
The river is responsible for a joke blowing up a logjam and sending us forward a dance step or two. The river is responsible —
When a youth looks at the role of the bends and out to the delta and says, “Boy, I have a long way left to go,” that is the river asserting responsibility.
The river is filled with google-isms.
The river attracts youth leaping like a magnet —
— the river is the painfully overabundant and therefore laughably adorable use of “underwater” for what the sexually repressed call you-know-what. The river is a hungry heart.
The river launches carp into the air in buzzing cessnas over Boulder to watch kids pretend that they’ve been Johnny Carson in 1992 all their life and think they can just skip past the arc of enthusiasm and development a job like that implies, these wild tufts of hair, scratches of baldness, or simply bald chaps walking backwards off of Baseline Rd. and into the rising mountains —
— all the way back into the mountains telling not so much jokes as knowing leers as birds pull U-turns when faced with the ground and pass by the lens on the screeching upswing.
The river will shoot the chasing bankers — in fact, does — and when they tumble in like characters from one of those James H. Nicholson films — the kind of people who expect boxers to throw themselves into arabesques and échappé sur les pointes after every blow that lands — the river hides the body in the Mississippi or Missouri so that no one will suspect —
A bird pulls a fish to a branch overlooking the river and hears joyous shouts and looks to see — 
— what is going on, but they can’t see it yet, they just hear echoes of youth bursting through the woods irregardless of the the clock or the larger more cocentric clock that encompasses that or on and on or the larger door-like clock that encompasses even that, and it is too much — 
— too mud-luscious, too puddle-wonderful to see what first hit us in those lines hit us again in how we group the actors and patterns and march them out as quickly onto the stage as possible — not having a news crew or a travel documentary crew or a TV show or a newspaper on our hands (making sure that the actors walk off the set wanting to keep the show with them when it’s all over being our overriding concern), only having us — to pinch the neck part of the neck-tie for habit’s sake and then cough and say —
The river will attempt a loop-de-loop on this very stage — in just a moment.
